I had a feeling I wasn't going to like this but I manage to get through it. Nearly everything that Stephen King has ever written seems to have been turned into a film or TV series; in fact, I'm surprised that no one has tried to make a mini-series from the guy's grocery list. Let's face it, if they did, it couldn't be any less interesting than 'Children of the Corn.'
Based on one of King's many short stories, this 1984 horror flick sees Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton playing a couple on a long car journey who run into a spot of bother when they chance upon the sleepy Nebraska town of Gatlin, where all of the adults have been murdered by children who worship an ancient evil that lurks in the corn fields.
Although director Fritz Kiersch does manage to build a fair amount of atmosphere at the beginning (after Hamilton's silly song and dance, but before we get to meet the freakish Isaac, leader of the killer kids), he completely blows it with endless unexciting scenes in which Hamilton and Horton are hunted down by the town's homicidal half-pints. Courtney Gains, as violent redhead Malachai, manages to appear genuinely menacing, but the rest of the children are not the least bit threatening; as a result, many of the film's 'scary' moments fail to work.
Towards the end of the film, when we finally get to see the malevolent force that inhabits the field surrounding Gatlin, the film descends into a glut of terrible 80s visual effects that probably looked pretty ropey almost 25 years ago, but look positively laughable nowadays.
'Children of the Corn' might be of interest to King fans keen to see how the writer's work has been translated to the big screen, but your average horror-film fan will be most unimpressed.
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